Islands

As I make my way up to a famous Michigan island I began thinking about a couple other islands a bit more relevant to my current investigations. This idea of an island as a trace presents its own perspectives on the scenario. When tracing past occupations and exposing a gradient of culture, material and mingling ecologies the island can collect them into a refined bundle rather than the loose webs of broad landscapes. The nature of the space can be confined to the definiion of a shoreline and as such nearly quarantine itself.

An island that has removed itself so mug that it does not appear on tourist maps is that of North Brother Island. Off the shores of Manhattan towards the north east side it now sits abandoned, closed to the public and a protected bird sanctuary. During the typhoid outbreak this island had an entire hospital complex constructed for the quarantine of patients. After use it was used briefly as a medical facility for the military before closed completly. Now the brush and vines has taken over collapsing roofs and blanketing the complex in green. Lush life and a santuary for birds from the chaos of Manhattan now occupies what was left behind. Only park rangers head towards the North Brother Island now to observe and monitor the birds.


An island that has yet to find its lush green endings is Hashima Gankanjima Island, nicknamed battleship island in Japan. It is instead a hard dry monolith of industry. Discovered for its coal miners headed to the island and built a village on the island. It was once the most densly populated place in the world and now not one resident remains. The harsh salt waters have sprayed at the concrete buildings, making them brittle and rusting the metal understructures that support them. Only recenlty opened for visitors on one end of the island because most of the large apartment buildings are now structurally unsafe because of the lack of care and the weathering from the environment, occupation is still only brief by locals and the tourist they take interested in seeing the dense goast town of decay.

Aesthetics of these places are always enticig to talk about as well as the mystery and past that lies in the ambience of the site. What is most compelling about these two places to me is the surge of occupation followed by a sudden lull followed by the immediate transition again. The context and ecologies of these confined landscapes allows them either to return back to its natural state because the tightly networked systems or can not return back because of its detachment from the larger working systems on the mainland. Its a curious situation to design for a sudden surge of people and then be prepared for transitions toward nature an the temporal trace inbetween.

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